Ready for some crazy The Witcher 3 news? This, apparently, is what years of dedication to your IP and artful refinement of your category buys you: The third installment in a once-abstruse roleplaying series by likewise recondite Polish developer CD Projekt Red sold 4 million copies in its first two weeks.

That’s not quite Skyrim turf — Bethesda’s open-world roleplaying opus managed 7 million copies in just one week and over 20 million copies to date. But it’s one heck of an upsurge over the last game in CPR’s series, The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, itself considered a resounding success both critically and commercially for the developer, with somewhere in the vicinity of 2 million copies sold worldwide.

I was lucky enough to get in on the ground floor with the original The Witcher, a PC-only game that came out of nowhere back in 2007, packing a…